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Re: Init system for non-Linux ports



On 28/01/14 22:31, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
> 1. stay with sysvinit

I know that would be the least work, but I think we should take the
opportunity to switch now to one of the modern init systems.  Some
package maintainers specifically expressed that they don't want to
maintain SysV init scripts for much longer;  any other init system at
least gives them one alternate syntax.

> 2. switch to OpenRC unconditionally
> 3. switch to Upstart unconditionally
> 4. switch to Upstart only if Linux uses it by default, otherwise OpenRC
> 5. further discussion

My preferences at the moment would be: 2 4 1 3 5

I really appreciate the recent work toward porting libnih and Upstart,
but unless Debian was *fully* behind it I don't think we'd gain much for
the additional complexity.  The event model seems a key difference to
me.  It sounds better suited to laptops, portable devices and
hot-plugging, whereas for now I think the non-Linux ports still need the
robustness and simplicity of a traditional dependency model, even if it
lacks speed or some special features.

OpenRC is *very* simple code, and BSD-licensed, which I think we could
more easily extend to our needs.  It works almost well enough already to
boot GNU/kFreeBSD, and also inside BSD jails.  I've read that it is
built and somewhat usable on GNU/Hurd, though I don't know how much more
work would be still needed (probably rewrite of the early rcS.d scripts).

And whichever one is used for the jessie release, it maybe won't hurt to
keep the other one around, built and available to play around with, but
unsupported.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org

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